WK's Top something or other... let's just say "games" and call it good list.

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What can I say about Xenogears? I often consider it a completely terrible game, but it does have an amazing story. This isn't the palce to discuss that, though.

I'm glad FFVI ranked so high! I would rank it 3rd in my favorite FFs, but I don't think it would be 3rd in general.

MGS3 is a great game too. I remember when it was new I used to love sneaking around to stab people. In a less creepy way than that sounds.

Is that Leene's Bell I hear chiming in the background? I recently had to list my top 5 favorite games for a class I'm in, and Chrono Trigger was number #1. I'm not sure if that's where I would place it if I took the time to carefully consider everything, but its certainly a good choice.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is the only entry in the series I actually played, as my friend insisted on watching me play through it, lack of knowledge of the rest of the series be damned. It was a fun game, but a bit difficult to play because I'm *so* used to "following the game's rules" that a game that basically rewards creativity in figuring out new and interesting ways to even interact with the game at all was a strange experience. Suffice it to say I probably didn't do half the things you can even do in this game.

I didn't get particularly attached to the characters and their struggles so it didn't move me all that much in the end, though the presentation of the ending was top notch nonetheless.

Well, at least I've played #3 and #2, time for the inevitable #1 I still have never played.

MGS3 is a masterpiece and I definitely agree it's the best in the series.

The gameplay is out of this world, and if you see Kojima's commentary on it it's a master class in game design. From the really obvious placement of a snake in a tree early on to remind you to look up to Snake looking at a hornets nest and smiling to subtely let you know how to take out some enemies, it's pure genius.

You mentioned blowing up the enemy storehouses to make them hungry and give away their positions but you didn't mention my favourite trick with that. They're so hungry they'll eat anything they find. So if you happen to leave poison dart frog meat lying around they'll eagerly seize it, stuff their face and then drop dead, twitching. What the smurf kind of video game lets you do that?

And that ending, smurfing hell. That sort of sad, vaguely patriotic version of the MGS theme when Snake refuses the handshake and leaves the President's office while an oblivious Johnson stands and looks patriotic is such a powerful moment but nothing compared to what comes next.

The slow build up to an even sadder version of the MGS theme and it crescendos right as it shows you all those little moments throughout the game where you should've known, even just a grab of a rope bridge means everything. And that smurfing salute, it's more than I can stand. I still feel angry about what they did to the Boss and yet I know none of it is real, what more can I possibly say?

I mentioned Peace Walker earlier in the thread and even though the concept reverted back to MGS' beloved techno-nonsense, it was so cathartic to see The Boss get vindication and seeing her choose to sing instead of fight.

I played through MGS3 again last year after like 6 years of not playing it and was surprised by how well it aged. No indicators, no mini-map, very barebones "you figure it out" design and I really really miss that in most modern games. The only gripes I have is that CQC is never quite as smooth and powerful as the cutscenes make it out to be, we spend a little too much time on our belly on harder difficulties and the Pain and the Fear had lackluster executions.

Other than that I love all the options this game gives you to tackle areas and boss fights. It's incredible how unique every jungle area feels despite being the same jungle. Love the transition into urban areas for change of pace. The warehouse and the lab before the End fight are my favourite areas.

I still want to do a "knife and fork only" run (save some boss fights).

Despite never really questioning where this would fall on my list, I haven't really spent much time thinking about what I was going to say about it. As you can probably tell from some of my more recent entries, "gushing endorsement" is not exactly my forte when writing commentary for something I love. What I can say is that Chrono Trigger may be the closest thing to a perfect game I've ever played next to MGS3. The few critiques I can give it either have forgivable explanations, people ignoring the game's adventure spirit and taking the time travel rules way too seriously, or really just comes down to a person's personal preference for what they want in a game. You may not need to like it, but it is one of the most tightly designed games that shows the pedigree of the crew that worked on it.

I do oddly feel like I need to explain the plot a bit just because I know it's a bit like Xenogears and probably known better for it's reputation than the details. Chrono Trigger is the story of resident silent protagonist Crono, who travels to the Millennium Fair which is a year round celebration of not only the Kingdom's birth, but the 400 year anniversary of their victory over the Mystic Army led by the evil Dark Lord Magus. Crono quite literally bumps into a mysterious girl with a strange pendant named Marle and the two become quick friends as they explore the fair before going to see Crono's childhood friend Lucca's exhibit. Lucca is the daughter of the blacksmith, and the two both love to dabble in machines. They built a teleporter to showcase at the fair and use Crono as the guinea pig. Seeing the success, Marle wants to try it too, but the teleporter reacts to her pendant and instead of teleporting her between the two pods, opens a gate that swallows her up except for her pendant. Crono volunteers to go after her and uses the pendant to enter the gate. He finds himself in a strange medieval land that is under siege by a monster race called the Mystics and was recently in an uproar because the Queen went missing but recently was found again. Crono quickly realizes he's been sent back four hundred years into the past and is in his home country during the great war. Being granted special audience to meet the queen, Crono finds out that Leene is actually Marle who was mistaken for her ancestor because she's actually Princess Nadia from their timeline. Yet their reunion is cut short when Marle suddenly fades out of existence just as Lucca appears on the scene. It turns out that due to Marle being mistaken for her ancestor, her ancestor was never found and eventually killed, altering time and making Marle cease to exist. It then winds up being Crono's job to fix history. What transpires afterwards is a tale that jumps back and forth across the planet's great history where Crono will meet many figures from history and try his best to save the planet from a menace that will destroy the world in the distant future.

With the exception of Link to the Past and Mega Man 2, some might find it surprising that my favorite game of all time isn't some thought provoking, pretentious and obscure Japanese only game, but instead a pretty idealistic swashbuckling adventure tale best known for being made by the Dream Team of Sakaguchi, Horii, and Toriyama as well as most of the development teams that worked on FFVI, VII, Xenogears, and Chrono Cross. More than any other game on this list, Chrono Trigger was a game that both inspired me and was just a complete joy for me from beginning to end. I mean I can't help but smile while I write this piece as I think about how wonderful this game is. I think maybe the reason why I am so enamored by it is due to the fact that the game was so damn ahead of it's time.

Gameplay uses the ATB 2.0 system which was designed for better speed, which worked out perfectly with the game's new map and battle design that largely dropped random encounters and created a seamless transition into battle. Even more interesting is the game's use of space in regards to character abilities making the timing and clever use of your skills more important since you want to maximize the amount of potential damage you can do by waiting for the enemies to bunch together or perfectly line up for Flame Toss or Air Slash move. This gives battle a more organic feel as you balance eliminating enemies through speed or efficiency. The game also introduces Dual and Triple techs, which are not new to the genre, but never used as quite extensively as this title does so. By having characters learn and gain new combination attacks, you can build better synergy with certain party builds and the mechanics makes it more enticing to try out different combination builds. This was something I felt FFVI was trying to do with the unique skills system but largely fell a bit flat since people tended to stick with what worked best instead of open experimentation. It works better here cause the party is largely balanced pretty well against each other, though the game still has scenarios where certain parties excel over others like the magic-centric Ocean Palace or Ayla excelling during the Blackbird scenario. I also appreciate the fact the cast are all individuals with unique skills sets to set them apart and make them all feel unique. Crono is the perfect offense character, Marle is the perfect defense, Lucca is a strong mage build with crowd control, Robo is melee focus, but can actually do a little of everything if need be, Frog is a combat medic, Ayla is pure brute force character with the only thief skill, and Magus is the strongest offensive mage with the best versatility in elemental exploitation. If making this list has taught me anything, it's that I gravitate towards RPG systems where the characters are individuals in gameplay more than blank slates systems where I can make everyone into anything I want.

With all the above said, the other thing I feel Chrono Trigger perfects from VI's design is better gameplay balance. In recent years, I realize that VI is best played with minimal grinding. You're meant to be constantly moving forward and never stopping to grind up skills, but the Esper system makes this a bit counter-intuitive so it doesn't take much to bork the game in your favor by stopping to level up once in awhile. CT solves this issue with the seamless battle system that makes it a bit more challenging to grind and the level design that encourages constant forward movement. I'm usually surprised how often I hear from other fans of the game how no one ever really grinded in this game. It's not that you can't but the game's design hides it better than you can in titles where you have to deal with random encounters. By playing the game in it's proper way, you'll find that CT has one of the best difficulty curves of any game Square has ever developed. Like the game never feels insurmountable but at the same time, it takes a long time before you feel like dropping skills for pure melee either, so the gameplay stays more focus and interesting throughout. About the one complaint I can give the battle system is that Triple Techs often feel awesome but impractical as many of them only unlock when you acquire some of the characters end game skills which are generally so powerful, it's more efficient to have everyone use them individually than waste everyone's turn to perform a triple tech that will do a third of the overall damage the former strategy could do, course Triple Techs are great on NG+ when you want to seriously punish a boss that gave you grief the first time around.

Speaking of NG+, CT was not only one of the first JRPGs to utilize this function, but frankly designed the game around it in such a way to make it a more involving feature than other games that basically reduce it to "now you can just play for the plot". This comes into play with the game's central idea of altering history. The game is filled with small scenarios and a few one time only sequences that allow you to change history in smaller but still meaningful ways, the most famous being the ability to save Lucca's mother from being crippled. New players will often miss these elements the first time around unless they are using a guide (and why would you?) so NG+ gives a great chance to explore alternate scenarios. The bigger feature this adds is the ability to challenge the final boss at different times and thus change the game's ending. a handful of the endings are just glorified end credit scenes or some fourth wall breaking joke, but about half of them end up having the party alter history in strange and interesting ways that give focus to some of the cast and NPCs. I feel like it seals the deal on the game's whole time travel mechanic and gives this game loads of replay value which was something a bit unheard of at its time. In fact, that's one of the things I truly love about CT is that it's not a JRPG with time travel in the plot like say FF1 and VIII, it's an actual time travel story. In addition to getting engrossed in the stories of the character and individual time periods, the game slowly expands into you learning the general story of the planet itself. The game beautifully incorporates micro and macro level story telling to tell an epic tale which is something this team did later for Xenogears and Chrono Cross itself. It's kind of ingenious how quickly the game escalates from smaller stories into one larger piece. It's here we see the strengths of both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy's writing styles really compliment each other. DQ has always had a more episodic feel to their games with the party dealing with individual tales across the world that only slowly over time begins to interconnect a bit. Final Fantasy is more about personal character stories that are punctuated with strong story moments that shift and change the focus of the story. CT incorporates both in a seamless fashion to make the story feel so much more compelling than you would think. You get engrossed into the stories of the individual characters or the time period only to have some major moment like Lavos wiping out the Reptites or Crono's death to change the tone and scale of the story and tie everything that had happened before together or jump up the magnitude of the story onto a both a grander and more personal scale. This alone is something I truly love about the game is how well it incorporates the strengths of both companies styles.

Another aspect I love is the seamless way the game incorporates your actions in play-style to story moments. The Millennium Fair sequence in the opening and how it ties into Crono's trial later is such a mind-blowing moment for me, even more so than the Opera Scene in VI since you only learn in hindsight how you will be judged by simple actions and what you did and did not do during an innocent section of the game where you're likely to be just exploring and getting your bearings on everything. I find it amusing that both the trial and opera sequence were initially made or worked on by Kitase who added a cinematic flair, but it was Hiroyuki Ito who allegedly went back and added the more interactive moments to the game cause he found the sequences too boring when it was just text. The whole sequence is followed by the jail sequence which in another moment of great game design can either be played as a straight up dungeon with fights or played as a stealth section if you were careful enough and sneaked up on the guards to knock them out. I also love how there was an F-Zero knockoff racing sequence in the future and how you had to use time travel to accomplish later tasks like finding the Rainbow Shell, powering up the Moon Stone, or repairing Cyrus' grave. CT actually took the open ended sequence of the third act which Secret of Mana and FFVI had developed and finally perfected it in a way that combines the freedom to play the game at your own pace while also maintaining a strong story focus as your characters finish off the last few lingering plot threads within the story. The smaller cast makes it easier to write dialogue for all of them and so you don't have to deal with the impersonal voice of the lead like you did in VI.

CT has one of my favorite casts of characters, and Crono himself may be my favorite silent protagonist in a game. While it doesn't take much to realize the truth about Marle, I loved how the story about her relationship with her father concludes and it was nice how much of the heart of the team she was. I have always been partial to Lucca since I love mad scientist type characters and it was a treat going back to her house to see if her dad came up with some new tech for her not to mention I love the fact she makes her own ultimate weapon. Her interlude with her mother is also one of the more emotional moments in the game for me. Frog is such a character and I love his tragic backstory and all the moments he has leading up to the battle with Magus. His reunion with his troubled spirit and him awakening the true power of the Masemune was also such a cool sequence for him. Robo certainly has some of the most emotional scenes in the game, it's hard going to the future since so many tragic things happen there and so much of it has to deal with Robo who just takes it in stride since he's always looking at the big picture, his revelation about the true mastermind of the hero's quests during the campfire sequence is still one of my favorite moments. Ayla is just a fun character, while the prehistoric era was the one that took the longest for me to truly appreciate, Ayla was always such a fun and spastic character due to her simple but straight forward nature. She combined the best elements of Sabin and Umaro from VI and I love the twist with her "weapon". Magus, well he's just awesome and the fact he's an optional character entirely was always a boon. His personal ending is one of my favorite alternate endings in the game and his story is easily the most tragic of the whole cast. He's definitely one of the best antagonists Square ever made and it's not hard to see how much he influenced future characters SE worked on. The fact he was pulled from CC cause the staff feared he would overtake the plot and player's interest alone is a testament of how impactful he is. Crono himself also gets special mention, while his personality is most projected onto him by the player, he's one of the earliest examples of a silent character getting some personality traits given to the player through both Akira Toriyama's artwork for the game, his expressions, and some of the endings which shows him to be a far more mischievous figure than usual for these types. What makes him stand out to me is his death, which caught me off guard when I played it and made me really appreciate him more when I had to continue on without him. It was such a gutsy move by Square and no one has ever really tried to do it again since.

The villains and scenarios of the world themselves are also nice and I love how the game was able to kind of bring together so many cool scenarios and tie them all together, in fact Lavos is such a fantastic villain and the type not seen very often in the genre. You start off thinking it's some magical abomination made by Magus only to learn that's not true, then later you find out it's an extraterrestrial being sleeping within the planet, only to later find out it actually has intelligence and a larger scale goal than wanton destruction or survival. Lavos is one of the rare times game has created a Lovecraftian type antagonist and actually adhere to what makes such villains so intriguing. Lavos isn't just a creature that will eventually end the world, it's a creature that has irreversibly changed the course of all life on the planet and has tainted it for it's own purposes. While Crono and crew are fighting wars across time, they slowly learn that the real conflict has always been this alien's influence on the planet and it's evolution giving a grander scale to a being that never actually speaks within the story. The fact its appearance in the plot is always associated with the greatest shifts in the story and that Lavos has its own ending should the player die in battle against it just gives the being a greater sense of scope and impact that very few villains can quite match. I simply loved the idea of facing off against something that was intelligence and so far evolved to almost be incomprehensible that it has always been a bit difficult for me to go back to more chatty and humanistic villains. Not that CT isn't rife with such characters itself who all have their own interesting motives and story arcs, but I love how well Lavos kind of circumvents all of it.

Lavos ultimately ties together one of my favorite things about the game which is watching the story move beyond Crono and his friend and instead tell the story of an entire world. CT's plot may seem simple but it merges these simple but effective dramas to create a larger and more involving epic about the history of mankind, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the eventual end of the planet itself. Watching how events from one era begins a domino effect of change that ripples throughout time is both intriguing and novel to bear witness to. The Kingdom of Zeal especially always struck me as a cool watershed moment because the game had been hinting to it all along and there were certain things about the world that never made sense until the big reveal of the lost era.

Overall, Chrono Trigger is not as innovated as some of Square's other projects at the time, but it did take a lot of those ideas and perfect them. It built a game that greater than the sum of it's parts and I appreciate having a fun and idealistic adventure story I can plunge into and consume from beginning to end. I've played through this game more times than probably any other title on this list except maybe FFVI. This, along with VI are the only games I've ever liked enough to resort to true fan shenanigans like fan-fiction and I even tried to create a Chrono Table Top game in middle school. It's still one of the titles that really stirs my imagination and brings a smile to my face just thinking about it. I may even dust off my DS copy and start up a new playthrough. If you haven't had a chance to play this old relic of a masterpiece, I can't recommend it more, it's easily my favorite game of all time and when I started this list I didn't even hesitate to put it at number one. So that's my Top 100 Games list, thanks for reading!

I smurfing love Chrono Trigger and indeed I love all three games in your top 3.

I don't know your opinion on the Persona series at all, so Fynn will no doubt come out and shout at me "omg of course WK doesn't love Persona 4!" but that's a title I've heard a lot of things about and thought it might be up there.

FFVII, of course! But for real, not ironically. I knew that it would not be in your top ten, but my perception was that you think it gets too much attention compared to its siblings but it was still up there as a great FF. I thought perhaps it could've been in the 70's to 100.

I am surprised Persona 4 isn't there since it was pretty good and you like that series. Not surprised about your top choices, and they are great games. CT is one of the best games ever. I had it 50/50 if you would put FFVII on there. I don't know you well enough to know if you secretly loved it or not.

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